Auschwitz (16 page)

The discussions at Wannsee had no immediate effect upon Auschwitz. The Birkenau building plans were not suddenly altered to allow for new gas chambers, and there were no apparent differences in January in the overall operation of the camp. Since the early autumn of 1941, however, there had been a change in the location of the gassing experiments with Zyklon B. They had ceased to be conducted in Block 11 and now took place in the camp crematorium, just meters from Höss's own office and the main SS administration block. This solved one problem for the camp authorities—the
bodies from Block 11 would no longer have to be wheeled the length of the camp on Rollwagen (handcarts) to the crematorium to be burnt—but it created another, because the location of the murders was in a more exposed area aboveground in the mortuary next to the crematorium ovens, rather than in the secluded basement of the prison block.

At the start of 1942, Jerzy Bielecki witnessed the arrival of Soviet prisoners of war to be gassed in this new location.

But it was not just Soviet prisoners of war and those in the camp who could no longer work who were put to death in this horrific manner. Small numbers of Jews from the surrounding area in Upper Silesia who were unable to do hard manual labor were taken to the camp crematorium to be killed. There are no camp records showing the exact dates when these killings took place, but eyewitness evidence does suggest that it is likely that some murders were carried out in the autumn of 1941. Hans Stark, a member of the SS who worked in Auschwitz, gave this testimony.

The gassing of “unproductive” Jews from the area around Auschwitz continued in the weeks following the Wannsee conference. Józef Paczyński,
²⁶
an Auschwitz inmate who worked in the SS administrative building next to the crematorium, witnessed the arrival of a group of male Jews who had been sent to the camp to be murdered. He climbed to the attic of the SS building, lifted a roof tile, and had a clear view of the scene directly outside the crematorium. Says Paczyński,

Having suffered in the camp himself for nearly two years, Paczyńński felt no great emotion as he saw these people go to their deaths: “One becomes indifferent. Today you go, tomorrow I will go. You become indifferent. A human being can get used to anything.”

Crucial to this new way of killing was the lulling of the Jews with reassuring words. The camp authorities realized that prisoners from outside Auschwitz need not be driven by kicking and beating into the gas chamber. The procedure now was to convince new arrivals that walking into the improvised gas chamber in the crematorium was a normal part of the camp admittance procedure—they were not going to be killed, merely “disinfected” by taking a shower. This was a breakthrough for the Nazis, which solved a number of difficulties that the earlier killing squads had faced. Not only did it prove easier to get people into the gas chamber by deception rather than outright force, it was also less stressful for the killers themselves. And it was also the answer to another practical difficulty the Nazis had
faced in exploiting the belongings of their victims. Many of the earliest murders by gassing had been conducted on prisoners who had died with their clothes on, and it had proved difficult to remove them after death. This way, those about to die removed their clothes voluntarily—they even folded them up neatly and tied the laces of their shoes together.

Perry Broad,
²⁷
a member of the SS at Auschwitz, described in detail how the compliant atmosphere surrounding the murders was achieved. He recounts how Maximilian Grabner stood on the roof of the crematorium and told the Jews gathered below:

Then the members of the SS would gently encourage the new arrivals into the crematorium, “full of jokes and small talk.” According to Broad, one of the SS men then shouted through the door once it was screwed shut: “Don't get burnt while you take your bath!”
²⁹

Despite the advantages gained by this sinister duplicity, Höss and his colleagues soon realized that using the camp crematorium as a place of murder created difficulties for them. The biggest problem they faced was the level of noise caused by their murders: “In order to stifle the screams there were motors,” recalls Józef Paczyński. “Two motorcycles were revving so that no one will hear the cries. People were yelling and then becoming weaker and weaker. They had those motorcycles to conceal the yelling, but they failed. They gave it a try but it didn't work.” The noise of screaming from inside the improvised gas chamber was never adequately masked by the revving engines, and the position of the crematorium so near the other buildings of the camp meant that it was impossible to hide the murders from the other inmates. So, during the spring of 1942, Höss and other senior members of the SS tried to think of another way of conducting the killing. And as they did so, far from merely “following orders,” they would once again attempt to use their own initiative.

Auschwitz was beginning its evolution into a unique institution in the Nazi state. On the one hand, some prisoners were still admitted to the camp, given a number and ordered to work. On the other, there was now a class of people who would be murdered within hours—sometimes minutes—of arrival. No other Nazi camp functioned in quite this way. There were extermination centers like Chełmno, and concentration camps like Dachau; but there was only ever one Auschwitz.
³⁰

The development of this dual function meant that many inmates of Auschwitz now lived and worked, sometimes for years, in an institution that also killed others whose knowledge of the camp would be but momentary. For the Jews from the surrounding area found unfit to work, Auschwitz was a place of instant murder; for the Poles who had survived in the camp since its inception, Auschwitz had become a warped kind of home.

By now Józef Paczyński, who witnessed the murders in the camp crematorium, had been a prisoner in Auschwitz for twenty months. Few of those who had arrived in the summer of 1940 had survived this long unless they had succeeded in getting work indoors, “under a roof,” and Paczyński was no exception. He had managed to get a job in the barber's shop, cutting the hair of SS staff. This was a position of relative privilege, so much so that he was one of the few inmates who came into direct contact with the commandant himself:

While committing the crime of murder would have had catastrophic consequences for Józef Paczyński and his family, he knew that the act of
theft, “organizing,” was a necessity if he was to survive. In his barracks, Paczyński slept next to a friend, Stanislaw [Stasiu] Dubiel, who worked as a gardener at Höss's house. “And as I was lying next to Stasiu I said, ‘Couldn't we get some tomatoes from his [Höss's] garden?' And he said, ‘It's possible.'” Höss's garden backed on to the crematorium and there was a loose plank in the fence. “Just enter the garden through there,” Stasiu told Paczyński, “and you will have onions and tomatoes.”

On the prearranged day Paczyński entered Höss's garden via the loose plank and found pails of onions and tomatoes waiting for him, as promised:

The adventure of Józef Paczyński and his friend in Höss's garden is instructive, not least because it demonstrates important aspects of the developing relationship between the Germans and favored Polish inmates. When Paczyński's friend Stasiu explained to Höss's wife that he himself had authorized the taking of the pails of tomatoes and onions, he put himself forward as the person to be punished for the theft. After all, if gardeners like him were allowed to help themselves to vegetables, why was it necessary to plan the secret journey into Höss's garden at all? But Stasiu knew that Höss's wife was very likely to forgive him—because they had a working relationship. Of course, it was a relationship that the Nazis would have defined as one between a superior “Aryan” and an inferior “Slav,” but it was a relationship nonetheless. By reporting Stasiu, Höss's wife would not be calling for the punishment of a nameless inmate she had caught stealing—something that it would have been easy for her to do—but ordering the suffering of someone with whom she had worked closely for some time.

Over the life of the camp, this type of dynamic occurred again and again. Inmates describe how the best way to try and ensure survival (after gaining a job “under a roof”) was to become useful to a specific German. If that German came to depend on you, you would be looked after—even prevented from being punished or, in certain cases, killed. It was not so much that genuine affection existed, though that was possible; more that a major inconvenience would be caused to the German if a new prisoner had to found and trained as a replacement.

The search for a relationship with a powerful figure as a means of survival was not confined to Auschwitz; it was also a common factor of life in the ghetto. Only here the individual with the power of life and death could be Jewish as well as German. As the months went by in the Łódź ghetto, Lucille Eichengreen saw her own condition, and that of her mother and sister, steadily deteriorate. “The food was not enough to sustain life,” she says. “There was no milk, there was no meat, and there was no fruit—there was nothing.” The only way to improve their situation was for her to try and find a job, because that meant “an additional soup at lunchtime.” So she trudged around the streets of the ghetto from factory to factory looking for work.

But, by May 1942, Lucille still had not managed to find work, and she and her family were placed on the list to be deported: “They were all unemployed [on the list], and about 90 percent of them were the new arrivals.” But Lucille knew she possessed one advantage that the other German Jews on the list lacked. She and her family had, through their father's ancestry, connections with Poland. “I went with our Polish passports from office to office trying to get a deletion from the list, and I finally succeeded. I don't know how, but I did. And we stayed.” In her own mind Lucille is certain that it was her Polish roots that saved her and her family. “They wanted all the German Jews on that transport out of the ghetto,” she says. “And I could prove that, though we had come from Germany, we were not German. It shouldn't have been crucial, because we were all Jews—it shouldn't have made a difference, but it did.”

Between January and May 1942 a total of 55,000 Jews were deported from the Łódź ghetto and murdered at Chełmno. The Germans ordered these deportations, but—through another cynical and divisive measure that
the Nazis introduced—the Jewish leadership of the ghetto was forced to collaborate in deciding who went.